Buenos Aires Noir

by Ernesto Mallo

  “What if it were Brunner himself? Like in ‘The Purloined Letter,’” I said. “The body that never appeared is hiding in plain sight.”

  “Come on, Julia, an old woman who knits doilies did away with him and stripped him down to his bare bones?”

  “You should see those hands,” I said.

  And suddenly I thought of something else. “The quicklime, Andrés! The bag of quicklime, remember?”

  Andrés did not reply right away. “Julia, take an Advil and get some rest, please. I have to get up very early tomorrow.

  * * *

  That night I had a disquieting dream in which I was driving on a road full of potholes. At four in the morning I was fully awake. I searched for my cell phone in the dark and looked at the photos again. I paused on the one with more light and began to enlarge it. I discovered what looked to me like evidence. First, at the joint of the shoulder blade and the humerus, then between the crouched neck and the collar bone, and in the wrist area, joining the small bones of the hand with the ulna and the radius: those little curls of black wire, the same finishes I had seen Franca making at crochet class. I could perfectly imagine her reconstructing her husband’s skeleton with the patience of a goldsmith. The hands and feet must be the most complex part. Perhaps that was why they were missing or incomplete. But why would she go to that trouble?

  The following morning I was running a slight fever, and Andrés insisted on calling the doctor. It was just the flu, but for the next three days I had a very high temperature. One minute I would think I was better, but as soon as I got out of bed I was again attacked by bursts of fever and chills. One night I dreamed about two women in a procession, holding hands and wearing white tunics. The scene was somewhat ritualistic, you could hear the jingling of bracelets, and when they turned, although I could not see their faces, I knew they were both dead.

  * * *

  I finally started feeling better on the fourth day. I got up, took a shower, and dressed. And then I started to clean up the room. The mother-of-pearl jewelry box Adriana had refused to take was on the computer table. I did not know whether I wanted to keep it. I put it on the bed and opened it. I looked again at the old floor plans of the house and decided to keep them. I read some bland fragments of family postcards and threw them in the trash; I did the same with the rest of the papers. Finally, I shook the box to get rid of some pins and lint. A piece of paper was stuck to the bottom, stapled to one of the corners. I detached and opened it. It was a note written in black ink, in slanted and small handwriting:

  My beloved,

  Now we will forever be two hearts joined into one.

  Underneath was an initial in a complicated stroke that vanished into the paper’s worm-eaten edges. It could have been an E, but it also could have been an F.

  * * *

  There was no class the following Friday. Lidia came by the house to let me know poor Franca had suffered a stroke and was in the hospital. The prognosis was uncertain for now, her niece had told her. I was really sorry. I was sure I had discovered a crime, at least partially—I would never know with certainty the agreements and disagreements between them, nor how Brunner figured in the story—and I had a morbid desire to see the skeleton again.

  I bombarded Andrés with my conclusions. He listened to me with more attention now, but like a good devil’s advocate he objected to all my conjectures.

  His principal objection was the same as mine: Why would Brunner’s wife go to such trouble? If she had reduced him to bones, why didn’t she just throw them in the garbage? And what about those little curls of black wire that seemed so revelatory to me? Simple repairs, Andrés would say. Like a hardworking wife who, instead of mending his socks, mended his skeleton.

  “What about the hand we found here, how does that fit?” he would ask sarcastically.

  “That? A sinister gift between accomplices. Or just a coincidence.”

  I did not give up, and in my spare time, surfing the Internet, I found a possible answer to the first objection. “For a forensic anthropologist, bones speak: all of life’s events are stamped there, from before birth until after death.”

  Franca would not have wanted to run the risk of recognition (the more bones spread around, the more evidence beyond her control). Besides, maybe she took a secret pleasure in having Brunner exhibited there.

  My leave from the magazine was about to end and I started getting some requests around that time, a series of notes on distance learning among others, so for a few days I was distracted from my own drama

  * * *

  One Saturday morning, I passed, by chance, in front of Giacomo’s shop. When he saw me, he waved hello and gestured for me to approach. He wanted to introduce me to his partner Padeletti, who was on a stool drinking mate.

  “This is Ms. Julia, Paddy, the one I told you about who lives in the house that was Clarisa’s. She also knows Franca.”

  Paddy was about seventy and quite ravaged. He had a half-closed eye, and it took him a ton of effort to even get up and say hello. “Ah, a piece of work, those two women,” he said.

  “Giacomo told me you were friends—that you saw Brunner as a patient.”

  “He was a genius. You don’t know what hands he had; you’d leave after each session feeling like new . . . I hope he’s with his Chilean woman and not where I imagine!” he sighed.

  I was in a hurry to go. However, I could not resist asking a crucial question: “Excuse my curiosity, but did you see the skeleton in his office?”

  Paddy first looked at me with surprise, and then burst out laughing until a tear flowed from his half-closed eye. He dried the tear on his sleeve and looked at me with a mocking air. “You’re referring to Jacinto, the quiet man?”

  I was taken aback. Who was this Jacinto?

  “That’s what he called it,” Paddy explained. “He’d say it was his best friend. The only one who didn’t complain about bone pain. He was always joking with that poor skeleton.”

  And in a single instance, all my theories were shattered. I left feeling defeated and decided not to say a word about it to Andrés. After all, I had merely discovered the sad story of a secret love.

  * * *

  About six months after that meeting with Paddy, the magazine asked me to do a second part for the article on distance learning. Among other schools, I had to visit one at the border between Parque Chas and Agronomy that had joined the program. The principal’s name was Mimi; she was an affable woman, and was delighted to have a journalist visit. We talked for half an hour about the project and the way her school would participate, and before leaving, she insisted on showing me the classrooms where they would record some of the lessons. Thanks to the donations of many others, she told me, they now had a good deal of educational material, especially in the areas of geography and the sciences. As soon as she opened the door to the natural sciences department, I saw it: a skeleton hanging on its hook.

  I stood captivated in front of it. “Is it real?” I asked.

  “No. There’s likely only a few of those left; this one’s quite old, but it must be made of resin or plastic. And it’s almost complete. Other than that, it’s a mystery.”

  I could barely breathe. “A mystery?”

  “Yes, it showed up by itself.” She laughed. “I mean, we never found out who brought it in. It appeared one morning at the school door, packed in a box. Like an abandoned baby.”

  Ex Officio

  by Ariel Magnus

  Balvanera

  Translated by John Washington

  He barely heard the scream, and he didn’t hear the gunshot at all, or he didn’t think it was a gunshot that he was hearing, which is what happens when you live in the midst of an unending stream of chaos that is the interior patio of an apartment building in Bajo Flores—there’s no point in trying to make sense of all the racket, which makes this very public space, paradoxically, a perfect spot to commit a murder without anybody even noticing; hardly hearing the scream and then only retrospecti
vely interpreting the previous noise as a gunshot, enabled him to conclude that the subsequent sound was that of a body hitting the ground. Lichi lifted himself off the couch and stuck his head out the single window in his studio apartment. The silence was so complete it startled him: for the first time since he and his father moved to this tiny apartment in Bajo Flores he couldn’t hear a single radio playing, or even a dog barking; no plates were crashing against each other, and nobody was arguing on the telephone with their ex. Such extravagances of silence only occurred in moments immediately after a terrible tragedy.

  It was three in the afternoon on a Sunday, as gray as every day in this building with its interior patio not much more spacious than an airshaft, which is what folks in this city called the holes of stink and shadow that were meant to ventilate the most overcrowded and foul buildings in the barrio. The typical thing to do would be to play the fool, or roll into a ball, as they say in these parts, which is the second most popular sport in the country, just after that other sport you also play with a ball, but Lichi didn’t choose to be a cop to skirt the responsibility that was thrust at him, even when he wasn’t in uniform, whether here or in China. So, dressed to stay in, he left his apartment and rang his neighbor’s bell. If it was some hope of glory that pushed him out the door, the hope of single-handedly solving a crime and then possibly jumping up in rank was the fantasy of a real fool.

  A short woman, almost as young as he was, answered the door with a baby in one hand and a revolver in the other. If he would have walked out in his underwear Lichi couldn’t have felt more naked than he felt now, without his gun. What frightened him most was that the revolver was ancient, looking as if it belonged in a museum, one of those objects a person would inherit and not even know how to use.

  “Sorry, I thought it was my ex-husband,” the woman said, tucking the gun into a pocket. “Come on in.”

  In the six months that he’d been living in the building, Lichi, on his way to and from work, had only exchanged a casual hello with this woman, which led him to conclude that he inspired more confidence in her dressed as he was than in his police uniform, which is one of the least respected uniforms in the country, excepting, perhaps, the dust smock of a rural elementary schoolteacher.

  He accepted the invitation to enter, not as part of his investigation, but because of plain and simple curiosity—in and out of this apartment strolled more children than would fit standing up, and he wanted to know how many actually lived there.

  He counted seven, each a few inches taller than the last, like Russian dolls laid out on display, but all of them so quiet and still that they seemed like a single child, and certainly not an Argentinian one. His hunch turned out to be correct; they were from Peru, or so he concluded from the little flag stuck on top of the television playing a Peruvian music channel. What explained how so many kids could keep so quiet—which is what most surprised Lichi—was that the apartment, as small as it was, was chock-full of merchandise. Not even the craftiest little tyke could have scampered between those stacks. Bundles and bundles of all types of product were leaned against the walls, even blocking out the single window in the apartment. Depending on their size and durability, the bundles even served as the absent furniture: tables and chairs, shelves, couch, and even beds. The smell of packing tape was even stronger than the spice emanating from a pot meant to serve eight people.

  “I was just looking for a toothpick,” Lichi said, bumping into the bundle that was partially blocking the door and trying to figure out not if these products were legal, but to what level of illegality they belonged, and to thus decide if the thieves merited forgiveness, for stealing from other thieves, or another turn in jail.

  “Could you help me lift this package?” the woman asked, pointing to an open space between the ceiling and a tower of floor rags.

  Lichi wasn’t bothered; it was, rather, a relief that the neighbor didn’t wait too long to make it clear why she’d invited him in. Acting the gentleman, he leaned down, thrust his chest out like a weightlifter, and then, with a wink, asked for help from the largest of the little dwarves, who probably wasn’t any older than eight. And then, after heaving the thing up, he wished the kid had lent a hand, as the package of whatnots was surprisingly and almost unmanageably heavy. He was a slim man, and lifting the bundle up and into the right nook was harder than dragging his drunk father to bed last night.

  “Did you hear anything anomalous a moment ago?” Lichi asked, trying to catch his breath before leaving.

  “I heard a scream,” the woman admitted after a moment of thought, perhaps generated by Lichi’s use of the word anomalous. “It probably came from the crazy lady on the second floor. It sounded like they were killing her. Which is why I thought it was my ex-husband—that he’d gotten the floors mixed up.”

  Lichi took leave by tipping a hat he wasn’t wearing, and then climbed the stairs to the next floor. There were three apartments that faced (acoustically speaking) the crime scene, and he didn’t know which to start with. Just as he was about to hit the switch again, a light flicked on: if the Peruvian woman said that her husband might have been confused about the apartment, it had to be the one directly above. He pressed the bell.

  He immediately heard a groan, and then a shuffling. In the next apartment a dog started barking. He rang the bell again, instinctively peering in through the peephole, as if he would be able to see inside. Which is probably why he was not surprised that this was actually the case: they had installed the peephole backward (or maybe the door was installed backward). But he couldn’t see much, just a hallway with, at the end of it, the legs of someone sitting in a wheelchair. The legs quickly disappeared and in their place a bald man with a thick beard came into view.

  When the door finally opened, the light turned back off (the light timer was like an old man’s bladder, Lichi thought, thinking of his father again, who was probably, if his drunkenness permitted, about ready to get up to take a leak). The only remaining light in the apartment was dim, and came from the opposite corner, which didn’t give Lichi a clear view of the man’s face as he explained to him that he’d heard a scream and was coming to make sure that nothing bad had occurred. It would have helped to be able to see the man’s face, because he remained silent.

  “May I?” Lichi asked, forgetting that he wasn’t wearing his uniform, and that he didn’t have a good reason (or a warrant) to search the place.

  It took him a few more seconds to realize that the man didn’t understand Spanish, and so he gave him his first lesson—less about the language than about the idiosyncrasies of the country—by walking in without further formalities. Compared with the last apartment, this one was almost empty, with just a few drapes hanging from the walls and a couple carpets under the sparse furniture, which looked as if it was made out of toothpicks. And yet the oppressive air was thick, almost unbearable. Lichi felt it in his stomach, his chest, even before he got up the nerve to peek his head into the kitchen and see the wheelchair, which was now squeezed between the freezer and a scratched Formica folding table. The skinny legs sitting in the chair were bare all the way up the thigh, provoking in Lichi a brief erotic fantasy (which he would never confess to, not even to himself), and belonged to a woman whose arms and face were disfigured by a horrible sickness, one of those sicknesses Lichi was glad he didn’t even know the name of. She had her hair chopped seemingly at random, her gaze was fixed on the ceiling, she was drooling, and—her only sign of personality—a green hoop earring hung from a horribly swollen ear. What seemed at first to be a sash, wrapped around her green tunic at the level of her flat chest, turned out to be a belt tying her to the chair. And there was no doubt that the cloth wrapped around her mouth was a homemade gag.

  “She wanted to,” said a veil-covered woman who appeared around the corner and must have been the mother.

  Moved by the fact that inherited looks, from parent to child, would survive such a deforming sickness (it’s all about the genes), Lichi hesitated a few s
econds before grasping that the woman did speak Spanish, unlike her husband, and was giving Lichi an explanation before he even asked for one. He was tempted to ask her what the poor girl had wanted, if she wanted them to tie her up, gag her, or both, but the question provoked a bit of dark pleasure in him, and he kept quiet.

  “She wanted to . . .” the woman repeated like a mantra. Then she repeated herself yet again.

  As she proceeded to slowly untie the cloth around her daughter’s mouth, and as if she were wondering whether or not the daughter would understand that she needed to behave herself in front of a visitor, the father offered Lichi a tiny cup of tea that he seemed to have pulled out of his pocket, just as certain waiters can hand out a plate of gnocchi or steak and fries almost as soon as you order them. They seemed to feel such guilt about the state of their daughter that Lichi started to feel guilty himself, though mostly about his presence in their space. He would have gotten out of there if the offering of tea hadn’t tied him even more tightly, though subtly, than the belt around the twisted limbs of the young woman.

  “You didn’t notice, a few moments ago, the sound of a gunshot?” Lichi took the opportunity to ask the potential witnesses.

  “The crazy lady below us is the one with the gun,” the mother said, with about the same disdain the neighbor had used to talk about her daughter.

  Suddenly another shot rang out, much louder than before, and Lichi deduced that it must have come from a higher floor (though sound, he knew, rises). He hurried to finish his tea (leaving tea in a cup so tiny, he imagined, could be taken for an unpardonable offense in these people’s culture) and said goodbye to the family. Sure that he would run across other neighbors, all of whom would be asking what had just happened, or maybe even already standing over a cadaver, intensified the state of emptiness in which he found the hallway. Standing in front of the stairway he felt himself facing another dilemma: maybe he should forget the whole thing and go back to his apartment, at least to make sure that his dad could make it to the bathroom and not wet the bed.